Forecasting the Unit Price of Water and Wastewater Pipelines Capital Works and Estimating Contractors’ Markup
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Municipalities and water utilities need to make realistic estimates for the replacement of their aged water and wastewater pipelines. The two main objectives of this article are to present a method to forecast the unit price of water and wastewater pipelines capital works by investigating inflation in their construction price, and to quantify the markup that contractors add to bid a project price. The Geometric Brownian Motion model with drift is used for investigation. Results show that the inflation in water and wastewater pipelines reference projects were 6.41% and 5.52% per annum, respectively. These values compare to the inflation in the Standard & Poor's/Toronto Stock Exchange (S&P/TSX) Composite Index of 6.93% per annum. In contrast, inflation in Canada's Consumer Price Index (CPI), and Engineering News-Record's Construction Cost Index (ENR's CCI) for Toronto are estimated to be 2.53% and 2.85% per annum, respectively. The spread in the inflation rate between the reference price indices and that of either ENR's CCI or CPI is a measure of the market price of catchall financial premium (defined as markup) that contractors add to project cost to account for profit, risk, and market conditions. This spread is estimated to be 3.56% and 2.67% per annum for water and wastewater pipeline capital works, respectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".